These days video games are a massive part of the progress in home entertainment, they are bought all over the world and some have amazing stories. Some may even say that they would rather experience a story by playing the game rather than watching the film, this is due to how immersive the games can be and a big reason for this is some of the amazing sounds we get from games. Games now have incredible life like sounds and even sounds that have never been heard before from the engine of a raging audi R8 in Forza 4 to the robotic language of the geth from the mass effect series.
But did sounds really start off like this the fact is no, no where near. Some of the most earliest games had sound which today sounds quite ear shattering. To find out first we have to go back to some of the earliest video games created, lets take a look at the well known pong game.
Pong was first released in 1972 on the Atari and was also made by Atari too. This game was incredibly popular and made video games more known as well as paving a way for future commercial advancements. As you can see its a very early pixelated game with only two colors but the sounds here are very different from what we have today. These sounds were created electronically, they were programmed into the game and consist of beeps and buzzes which today sounds very annoying. There was only around 4-10 sounds altogether and these were very simple. due to the success of pong later other versions were released with better sounds. People realised this was a booming industry and new games were being created very fast and quickly improvements where made. This can be seen in the next game PAC man.
PAC man is an arcade game which was first released on the 22nd may 1980, it was developed by namco. This game was massively popular world wide and till this very day it is still played on a serious level. PAC man was considered a major character in gaming history simply because of how well known and how addictive the game was, PAC man also became a symbol of pop culture.
Here you can see that the sounds are very electronic and sound like a buzz which you would get from a morse code machines, these sounds where programmed into the game and there where only up to 10 sounds in total. later versions of this game came out and most people are familiar with the newer version yet they still have similar sounds and are still electronic. by this time nothing was recorded into the game.
Here is a more modern version most people are more familiar with, this is a very popular game that it is everywhere and google even used it as there search engine logo:
At this point games are getting increasingly better but the sound is still in a primitive state, although as the years went on sound had improved to keep up with the progress of the graphics, this is shown perfectly on the sega mega drive. The sega mega drive (also known as sega genesis) was classed as a 4th generation video games consol this was called the 16-bit era. Here there were games like sonic, NHL 94 and of course the controversial mortal kombat game which was said to be very violent and caused kids to become violent. this accusment is valid seeing that you can rip the spin out of your opponent after you've left them in a pool of their own blood.
Here is the sonic game on mega drive
As you can see just like before the sounds are all electronic but comparing to the previous games you can see that a lot has improved from a few beeps and buzzes to a whole track! this was possible because technology had improved and the sound chip was able to hold more data, enough to add more just like thgis game hadf. the tune is still so popular that modern sonic games still have this style of music and the same tune even though it is so old. This shows that it was very sucsessfull. Also the recorded sounds first came though, in the beginning when the sega logo comes up there is a voice over with a group of people singing 'sega'! Here is one of the first example of actual words in a game, you cannot mimic the sound of a human voice effectively on an electronic sound system, therefore the makers had to put a recorded sound into the intro. This was first released in 1991 and by 1992 when mortal combat came out sounds had already progressed immensely.
This game was unique seeing that nothing like this had been done so well before, the characters you where playing as were real life actors who had their bodies taken pictures of and put into the system. Sound wise this game explored a lot in recording sound, words and voices such as fight, finish him, excellent and get over here were recorded and put into the game as well as recordings of people being hit or throwing punches. Since 1991 when sonic came out to 1992 in one year sound was developed a lot, every map had its own theme tune and even the sub games too.
Here is a video on many of the violence in this game which caused a lot of trouble for the video games industry.
Due to the major sucsess of the mega drive the industry exploded and there were games created left right and center this alowed the market to get more serious and newer consols came out which and were
the first true mordern games consels, these consols included the nitendo n64 forerunner of todays wii ranges,
the playstation, the forerunner of the playstation 3 and the up coming playstation 4 (orbis), and also the sega saturn.there were many more consols but these were a few of the best these were the 5th generation consols.
This was the 32- 64 bit era and more better graphics ment that the sound had to keep up with the graphics. Here is were the recorded sound technology really came into play and many of the games on these devices had sounds that needed to be recorded, this started when games were based more on real life such as simulations therefore the electronicly programmed sounds from previous games consols did not match the expectations. An example of this is the best selling game on the playstation which was 'gran turismo', this was a simulation game on racing and programmed sounds could not get the sound of a cars engine therefore recordings of car engines were put into the game, the game still had electronicly programmed sounds for the music and small little beeps but still the recorded technology really began here. Other well selling games on the PS1 were Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider.
.
Here is game play footage of Gran Turismo on the playstartion 1:
The N64 had many great games too, because nitendo made there own games there were a lot of exclusives such has the whole mario franchise which included super mario 64, mario kart 64, yoshi's story etc. The game that i am going to talk about is the star wars game 'star war shadows of the empire' by lucas arts. This game was created more than a decade after the start of the franchise and much of the music from the film are recorded into the game. This is an example of sound technology improving, the soundtracks were played through out the whole game and this worked very well to keep up tension and keep the player on the edge of their seat, this was one of the first to really do this and it caught on later in other games when tense scenes came up. Other sounds like explotions and charecter sounds are also recorded but there are still a few electronic clicks and buzzes. This is a point in time where makers tended to use recorded sound more often because it sounds more realistic and more variety of sounds is on offer.
Round this time every game is using recorded sound for their games. They feel that it is more flexible to use and easily incorperated into the games, also if they couldnt find the right sound they could get a similar sound and manipulate it into a form which would be more benificial for them to intergrat into the game.
Now we are going to look at games from modern consols, mainly the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. On an xbox exclusive game halo 4 has had a whole remodeling of the sounds due to the new company which has taken over called 343 industries, this ment getting new sounds for all the gun and to do this they went into a shooting feild and recorded the sounds of many different sort of guns including snipers, machine guns and even rocket launchers.
As you can see from this demonstartion the technology in the feild of sound designing has grown soo far and is seen as very important aspect, in this you can see the sophisticated equipment which have motion censors etc. just to make the sound more pleaseing to hear. As you can see they go to extrem lengths to get the exact sound, in this video they actually go to tazmania to get a viouse sound from a tazmanian devil
In this video also by 343 indstries showing how they collected sounds outside and all of these sounds were later used in the actual game. As you can see these were collected outside with very expensive equipment and precise equipment. This is done in most games now due to it being such an important part of games.
A very well known and respected sound designer is Ben Burtt, he is an a multi award winning, American sound designer which has worked on an incredible number of popular films such as, the Star wars series and the Indiana Jones series. Other films include E.T. and WALL-E. as you can see the time gap between some of these movies for example indiana jones and WALL-E which had decades between them. Ben Burtt is also a director, screen writer and voice director, he is known for creating such iconic sounds as R2-D2, the light sabre hum and Darth vaders heavy breathing which people all around the world recognise. As a director Ben Burtt made a lot of documentaries and preferred them over other types of films although he still did make some which relate to some of his previous work.
So as you can see sound designing is a massive part of the entertainment industry, with out proper realistic sounds film and games would not be as immersive as we see today, many people take it for granted but with out sound design you will never know what Optimus Prime sounds like when transforming, the sound on Indiana Jone's whip or even a fighter jet screeching over head. As technology grows better and better the world will hear new and amazing sounds thanks to many sound designers from games, films, TV series and a whole lot more. Thanks for reading and good bye.
0 comments:
Post a Comment